COVID cases are surging in Stearns County, in large part due to three meat packing plants in the area. We photograph St. Cloud Mayor Dave Kleis as he broadcasts his daily COVID-19 update to constituents on Thursday, May 7, 2020 at St. Cloud City Hall in St. Cloud, Minn.

What began in March as a small camp consisting of about a couple dozen homeless adults has now swelled to more than 100 residents in tents. Known as "Camp Quarantine," the fast-growing encampment has raised alarms over the health of the camp residents amid the coronavirus pandemic. Construction crews will begin installing a large metal fence around a homeless camp. Police are also expected to be on site too. The fence is being erected to contain the growth of the sprawling camp, which now has about 100 residents in rows of tents. The camp is located on Met Council property along the light-rail line near E. 28th Street and Hiawatha Avenue.

Since 1926, Howard's Point Marina in Excelsior on Lake Minnetonka has served up live bait, fishing accessories, refreshments and other necessities for enjoying time on the water.

Stephen Cole, Jennifer Hill, Luke Keele, Ilya Shpitser, and Dylan Small write: We wanted to provide an update on our efforts to build the Society for Causal Inference (SCI). As you may recall, we are creating the SCI as a home for causal inference research that will increase support and knowledge sharing both within the […]

Flavio Bartmann writes: Over the last few days, as COVID-19 posed some serious issues for policy makers who, both in the US and elsewhere, have employed statistical models to develop mitigation strategies, a number of non-statisticians have criticized the use of such models as useless or worse. A typical example is this article by Victor […]

Will Marble writes: I’m a Ph.D. student in political science at Stanford. Along with colleagues from the Stanford medical school, law school, and elsewhere, we recently completed a white paper evaluating the evidence for and tradeoffs involved with shelter-in-place policies. To our knowledge, our paper contains the widest review of the relevant covid-19 research. It […]

I’d still go with this article by Ed Yong, which covers biology, epidemiology, medicine, and politics. Here’s one bit: In 2018, when writing about whether the U.S. was ready for the next pandemic, I [Yong] noted that the country was trapped in a cycle of panic and neglect. It rises to meet each new disease, […]

Josh Rushton writes: I’ve been following your blog for a while and checked in today to see if there was a thread on last week’s big-splash Stanford antibody study (the one with the shocking headline that they got 50 positive results in a “random” sample of 3330 antibody tests, suggesting that nearly 2% of the […]

Lauren and Jonah wrote this case study which shows how to do Mister P in R using Stan. It’s a great case study: it’s not just the code for setting up and fitting the multilevel model, it also discusses the poststratification data, graphical exploration of the inferences, and alternative implementations of the model. Adam Haber […]

  This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. I’m going to say right up front that I’m not going to give sources for everything I say here, or indeed for most of it. If you want to know where I get something, please do a web search. If you can’t find a source quickly, […]

In comments, Joshua Ellinger points to this news article headlined, “Hundreds of thousands in L.A. County may have been infected with coronavirus, study finds,” reporting: The initial results from the first large-scale study tracking the spread of the coronavirus in [Los Angeles] county found that 2.8% to 5.6% of adults have antibodies to the virus […]

Kostya Medvedovsky writes: I wanted to direct your attention to the University of Texas COVID-19 Modeling Consortium’s new projections. They’re very similar to the IMHE model you’ve covered before, and had some calibration issues. However, per the writeup by Spencer Woody et al., they do three things you may be interested in: They fix an […]

Just a reminder that life goes on (thanks to commenter Lemmus), from the British Journal of Social Psychology: Are women more likely to wear red and pink at peak fertility? What about on cold days? Conceptual, close, and extended replications with novel clothing colour measures. Evolutionarily minded researchers have hypothesized that women advertise their ovulatory […]

Uros Seljak writes: You may be interested in our Gaussian Process counterfactual analysis of Italy mortality data that we just posted. Our results are in a strong disagreement with the Stanford seropositive paper that appeared on Friday. Their work was all over the news, but is completely misleading and needs to be countered: they claim […]

The above line is not a joke. It’s from Buzzfeed. Really. Stephanie Lee interviewed a bunch of people, including me, for this Buzzfeed article, “Two Big Studies Say There Are Way More Coronavirus Infections Than We Think. Scientists Think They’re Wrong.” I liked the article. My favorite part is a quote (not from me) that […]

So, there’s this new study doing the rounds. Some economists decided to study the twitter followers of prominent coronavirus skeptics and fearmongers, and it seems that followers of Nassim Taleb were more likely to shelter in place, and less like to die of coronavirus, than followers of Richard Epstein or Cass Sunstein. And the differences […]

I understand the above quote completely. Life would be so much simpler if my work was just reviewed by my personal friends and by people whose careers are tied to mine. Sure, they’d point out problems, but they’d do it in a nice way, quietly. They’d understand that any mistakes I made would never have […]

The following came in the email: I’m a reporter for **, and am looking for comment on the stats Gov Cuomo just released. Would you be available for a 10-minute phone conversation? Please let me know. Thanks so much, and here’s the info: Here is the relevant part: In New York City, about 21 percent, […]

Jon Baron read the recent article, “Presenting Characteristics, Comorbidities, and Outcomes Among 5700 Patients Hospitalized With COVID-19 in the New York City Area,” and sent the following message to one of the authors: I read with interest your article in JAMA. I have been trying to follow this issue closely, if only because my wife […]

Back in the early days of this blog, we had frequent posts about the differences between Republican or Democratic voters and Republican or Democratic areas. This was something that confused lots of political journalists, most notably Michael Barone (see, for example, here) and Tucker Carlson (here), also academics such as psychologist Jonathan Haidt (here) and […]

The OHDSI study-a-thon group has a pre-print An international characterisation of patients hospitalised with COVID-19 and a comparison with those previously hospitalised with influenza. What is encouraging with this one over yesterday’s study, is multiple data sources and almost too many co-authors to count (take that Nature’s editors). So an opportunity to see the variation […]

Steven Wood writes: There now some controversy regarding the effectiveness of Remdesivir for treatment of Covid. With the inadvertent posting of results on the WHO website. https://www.statnews.com/2020/04/23/data-on-gileads-remdesivir-released-by-accident-show-no-benefit-for-coronavirus-patients/ One of the pillars of hope for this treatment is the monkey treatment trial (the paper is here). As an experience clinical trialist I was immediately skeptical of […]

Simas Kucinskas writes: I would like to share some recent research (pdf here). In this paper, I develop a new method for estimating R in real time, and apply it to track the dynamics of COVID-19. The method is based on standard epidemiological theory, but the approach itself is heavily inspired by time-series statistics. I […]

Raghu Parthasarathy writes: I’ve been frustrated by Covid-19 pandemic models, for the opposite reason that I’m usually frustrated by models in science—they seem too simple, when the usual problem with models is over-complexity. Instead of doing more useful things, I wrote this up here. In his post, Parthasarathy writes: Perhaps the models we’re seeing are […]

Someone who wishes to remain anonymous writes: Here’s a joke we used to tell about someone in econ grad school, a few decades ago. Two economists were walking down the street. The first one says: “Isn’t that a $20 bill?” The second one says: “Can’t be. If it were, somebody would have picked it up […]

Last week we discussed the Santa Clara county study, in which 1.5% of the people tested positive for coronavirus. The authors of the study performed some statistical adjustments and summarized with a range of 2.5% to 4.2% for infection rates in the county as a whole, leading to an estimated infection fatality rate of 0.12% […]

This post is by Phil Price, not Andrew. There a couple of things that some people who comment here already know, but some do not, leading to lots of discussion in the comments that keeps rehashing these issues. I’m hoping that by just putting these here I can save some effort. 1. The ‘infection fatality […]

Suppose I play EJ in chess—I think his rating is something like 2300 and mine is maybe, I dunno, 1400? Anyway, we play, and my only goal is for the games to last as many moves as possible, and EJ’s goal is to checkmate me in the minimal number of moves. Say I have to […]

The talk will be sometime the morning of Wed 6 May in this seminar. Title: Some statistical issues in the fight against coronavirus. Abstract: To be a good citizen, you sometimes have to be a bit of a scientist. To be a good scientist, you sometimes have to be a bit of a statistician. And […]

The other day I wrote about the challenge in addressing the pandemic—a worldwide science/engineering problem—using our existing science and engineering infrastructure, which is some mix of government labs and regulatory agencies, private mega-companies, smaller companies, university researchers, and media entities and rich people who can direct attention and resources. The current system might be the […]

Seth Flaxman et al. have an updated version of their model of coronavirus progression. Flaxman writes: Countries with successful control strategies (for example, Greece) never got above small numbers thanks to early, drastic action. Or put another way: if we did China and showed % of population infected (or death rate), we’d erroneously conclude that […]

Joseph Candelora in comments pointed to this updated report on the Santa Clara study we discussed last week. The new report is an improvement on the first version. Here’s what I noticed in a quick look: 1. The summary conclusion, “The estimated population prevalence of SARS-CoV-2 antibodies in Santa Clara County implies that the infection […]

I’ve been reading a couple of old books of book reviews by Anthony Burgess. Lots of great stuff. He’s a sort of Chesterton with a conscience, for example in this appreciation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin: As for Tom’s forgiving Christianity—‘O, Mas’r! don’t bring this great sin on your soul! It will hurt you more than […]

I originally gave this post the title, “Stigler: The Changing History of Robustness,” but then I was afraid nobody would read it. In the current environment of Move Fast and Break Things, not so many people care about robustness. Also, the widespread use of robustness checks to paper over brittle conclusions has given robustness a […]

tl;dr: Their 95% interval for the infection rate, given the data available, is [0.7%, 1.8%]. My Bayesian interval is [0.3%, 2.4%]. Most of what makes my interval wider is the possibility that the specificity and sensitivity of the tests can vary across labs. To get a narrower interval, you’d need additional assumptions regarding the specificity […]

Kevin Lewis pointed me to this article. It seemed kinda familiar, I took a look at the abstract, and I realized . . . I reviewed this article for the journal! Here was my referee report: The paper seems fine to me. I have only two minor comments, both relating to the abstract. 1. I […]

We’ve had lots of discussions here and elsewhere online about fundamental flaws in statistics culture: the whole p-value thing, statistics used for confirmation rather than falsification, corruption of the pizzagate variety, soft corruption in which statistics is used in the service of country-club-style backslapping, junk science routinely getting the imprimatur of the National Academy of […]

1. The news! Zad’s cat, pictured above, is not impressed by this bit of cargo-cult science that two people sent to me: No vaccine or effective treatment has yet been found for people suffering from COVID-19. Under the circumstances, a physician in Kansas City wonders whether prayer might make a difference, and he has launched […]

Anthony Fowler wrote a wonderful op-ed. You have to read the whole thing, but let me start with his most important point, about “the temptation to overclaim” in social science: One study estimated the economic value of the people spared through social-distancing efforts. Essentially, the authors took estimates from epidemiologists about the number of lives […]

The other day we posted some Stan models of coronavirus infection rate from the Stanford study in Santa Clara county. The Bayesian setup worked well because it allowed us to directly incorporate uncertainty in the specificity, sensitivity, and underlying infection rate. Mitzi Morris put all this in a Google Collab notebook so you can run […]

See here. Please share your reactions and suggestions in comments. I’ll be talking with Seth Flaxman tomorrow, and we’d appreciate all your criticisms and suggestions. All this is important not just for Italy but for making sensible models to inform policy all over the world, including here.

Carlos Ungil writes: The IHME released an update to their model yesterday. Using now a better model and taking into account the relaxation of mitigation measures their forecast for US deaths has almost doubled to 134k (95% uncertainty range 95k-243k). My [Ungil’s] charts of the evolution of forecasts across time can be found here. I […]

What’s new? The new and shiny reduce_sum facility released with Stan 2.23 is far more user-friendly and makes it easier to scale Stan programs with more CPU cores than it was before. While Stan is awesome for writing models, as the size of the data or complexity of the model increases it can become impractical […]

The University of Washington in Seattle is a big place. It includes the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME), which has produced a widely-circulated and widely-criticized coronavirus model. As we’ve discussed, the IHME model is essentially a curve-fitting exercise that makes projections using the second derivative of the time trend on the log scale. […]

Part 1 Andrew Lilley, Gianluca Rinaldi, and Matthew Lilley write: You might be familiar with a recent paper by Correira, Luck, and Verner who argued that cities that enacted non-pharmaceutical interventions earlier / for longer during the Spanish Flu of 1918 had higher subsequent economic growth. The paper has had extensive media coverage – e.g. […]

Robin Lee writes: To check for linearity and homoscedasticity, we are taught to plot residuals against y fitted value in many statistics classes. However, plotting residuals against y fitted value has always been a confusing practice that I know that I should use but can’t quite explain why. It is not until this week I […]

By default, ggplot expands the space above and below the x-axis (and to the left and right of the y-axis). Andrew has made it pretty clear that he thinks the x axis should be drawn at y = 0. To remove the extra space around the axes when you have continuous (not discrete or log […]

David Rohde points us to this new seminar series that has the following description: Machine learning is changing the world we live in at a break neck pace. From image recognition and generation, to the deployment of recommender systems, it seems to be breaking new ground constantly and influencing almost every aspect of our lives. […]

John Fund writes: [Imperial College epidemiologist Neil] Ferguson was behind the disputed research that sparked the mass culling of eleven million sheep and cattle during the 2001 outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease. He also predicted that up to 150,000 people could die. There were fewer than 200 deaths. . . . In 2002, Ferguson predicted that […]

After getting 80 zillion comments on that last post with all that political content, I wanted to share something that’s purely technical. It’s something Bob Carpenter wrote in a conversation regarding implementing algorithms in Stan: One thing we are doing is having the matrix library return more expression templates rather than copying on return as […]